The Tree with the Lights in It

Scripture: Matthew 2:9-12


“When [the wise men] had heard [King Herod], they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.”

These words come from the New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, or the “NRSV” to its friends. Its precursor, the Revised Standard Version (or “RSV”), was published in 1952 and reflected fifteen years of work by a committee of distinguished biblical scholars. After its publication, the RSV was officially authorized for use by a vast array of Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. Indeed, whatever their other disagreements, these churches concurred about the quality and scholarship of the RSV. Another committee—equally distinguished—subsequently brought additional expertise to the text, resulting in the widely respected translation we find in the NRSV.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that all these fancy, highly educated, and deeply spiritual scholars did a pretty shabby job on this particular gospel passage. In these verses, the translators seek to tell us the story of Christmas. But just consider all the things they left out.

They left out the snow, the winter wonderland, and the giant inflatable yard ornaments. They left out the candy canes, the eggnog, and the fruitcake—the last being an omission many of us do not regret. They left out sleigh bells, silver bells, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, and five golden rings. They left out Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge, George Bailey, Charlie Brown, singing chipmunks, and that perenially annoying kid with the drum. They do mention presents, but since only one person got any—and it wasn’t us—they obviously missed the whole point of the passage. They even left out the centerpiece of the story: the thing we put all those presents under, the Christmas tree, the tree with the lights in it.

All kidding aside, it is remarkable to note the many layers of tradition we’ve piled on top of this sacred text over the centuries. Some traditions, like the tree with the lights in it, persist. Others have faded away as the world has changed.

For example, many years ago there was a story told among country folk—like us, I suppose—that on Christmas Eve the oxen kneeled down at midnight, just as they had done before Jesus in the manger. Some farming families honored a tradition of recounting this tale just before they put the children to bed. The great poet Thomas Hardy wrote a lovely piece about this tradition—and what it might mean to us adults. Slightly paraphrased, it goes like this:

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years, yet I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely farmyard by yonder vale
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

I suspect this explains why many of us cling so tenaciously to our Christmas traditions. They remind us that even in this tired old world there remains a cause for joy and amazement and celebration. So we return to those traditions, even in the gloom of the troubles that surround us, “hoping it might be so.”

Of course, traditions have their complications. Just consider my complicated fifty-two-year-old relationship with the tradition of the Christmas tree.

I have sweet memories of many of those trees. My grandparents, consistent with the fashion of the times, decorated their tree with piles of garland and tinsel until you couldn’t actually see the tree any more. My father, on the other hand, took a somewhat sparser approach in order to emphasize the ancient German ornaments that had been in his family for generations and that were, well, unspeakably ugly.

I remember the tree Lisa and I shared early on when we lived in a small loft apartment in Ann Arbor. We had no room for a real tree, so we adopted one that stood on top of an adjoining office building and that we could see through our living room window. I remember the first tree I cut down for Lisa, and the first trees Evan and J.J. cut down for our family, once they were big enough to work a saw and fast enough to get out of the way when the tree fell down. And I remember the handsome, freshly cut, piney smelling tree we brought into the living room one year that our dog Jackson decided to claim for his own .... I won’t describe how, but I suspect you can imagine.

But there were other years and other trees. There was the tree down the hospital corridor from the room where my grandfather died. There were the trees my family decorated when my father was away and we didn’t know when he’d be coming home. There was the first tree I decorated after my father’s passing, when I no longer had his big mitts clumsily handing me delicate old ornaments with the paint worn off of them. And there was a year of sadness and transition when I had no tree at all. I remember those trees, and those years, as well.

We do a lot of this at Christmas. We look back. We remember. Some years it is our cherished memories that give us the only warmth we find during the holiday season. And sometimes it is our recollection of harder Christmases that makes our current joy even brighter.

But, however we approach the season, we seek out the familiar. We honor our traditions, even in their bittersweet complexity. This is comforting, for sure; but it also gives rise to a problem.
I’m not talking about the problem that we have acquired so many layers of tradition that rediscovering the meaning of Christmas underneath them requires us to engage in something like an archeological dig. That is inarguably true, indeed so true it has become something of a cliché. But I’m talking about a different problem—one that comes from the nature of tradition itself.

Tradition relies on repetition, consistency, and predictability. It has a “now we do this because this is what we always do” quality to it. It lures us into comfortably rehearsed patterns of experiencing the season. We have a list, we check it twice, and when everything on the list has been accomplished we know we’ve finished with Christmas. And then we move on.

But this way of engaging with things conflicts with what Jesus—not the baby in the manger but the “young and fearless prophet”—calls us to do. Over and over again, throughout the gospels, Jesus urges us not to look back but to look forward. He implores us to recognize the work that stands before us—feeding the poor; sheltering the homeless; caring for the sick; comforting the distressed; fighting injustice and bigotry and hatred and violence wherever we find it. He challenges us to see things anew, afresh, as we have never seen them before, as filled with the innate stuff out of which might just come the very Kingdom of God.

Think about what Jesus said. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he repeatedly invites us to see things in a radically different way. "You have heard it said that you should not commit murder but I am telling you that even anger offends the God of peace." "You have heard it said that we should take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but I am telling you that revenge and retribution offend the God of forgiveness." "You have heard it said that we should embrace our neighbors and despise our enemies but I am telling you that such stinginess of spirit offends the God of love."

And think about how Jesus lived. He did not just have love for people—he had hope for them and faith in them as well. He drew in those that society cast out: the lepers; the unclean; the tax collectors; the prostitutes. He saw them as others did not, and being seen by him in that way transformed them. Society called them cursed; Jesus called them his children; and two-thousand years later we call them blessed; we call them disciples; in some cases, we even call them saints. And if this capacity to see everything and everyone with eyes that are refocused and reborn is fundamental to who Christ was then it must be fundamental to what Christmas is.

In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes what happened when surgeons first discovered how to perform safe cataract operations. Inspired by their success, the surgeons traveled across Europe and America operating on numerous men and women and children who had been blind since birth. Medical historians captured the reactions of these people when they first opened their eyes and saw.

Annie Dillard writes that these newly sighted people can teach us something about how dull our own vision is. Some were amazed by things we take for granted, like the miracle of what our hands look like when they move or the fact that everyone has a different face. One young boy was astonished by the appearance of a bunch of grapes: dark, blue, shiny, with bumps and hollows. A twenty-two-year old girl was so dazzled by the world’s brightness that she kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When she finally opened them, an expression of gratification and astonishment spread over her face, and she couldn’t stop looking at everything around her, all the time exclaiming: “Oh God, how beautiful!”

But my favorite is a little girl who, with her newly acquired sight, found her way into a garden and stood transfixed in front of a tree. For the first time, she saw the sun coming through the branches and illuminating the leaves. She was speechless for a while. But then she turned to the person beside her and said, “Ah, this is the tree with the lights in it.”

Traditions are wonderful things. They bind us together. They comfort us. And I hope nothing I’ve said will keep you from putting cookies out for Santa, or singing along with Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the radio, or wondering what the oxen are up to, or sitting quietly to admire the tree with the lights in it.

But I also hope that, as Christmas approaches, you will make time to look forward, to remember not just the cry of the infant Jesus but the call of the risen Christ, to understand that you are an instrument of God’s peace and a messenger of God’s love, to embrace everything and everyone around you with a full and forgiving heart, and to see, really see, as you have never seen before, occasionally even whispering to yourself, “Oh God, how beautiful!”

There is an old and simple story that might help you with this. Maybe you know it. Here’s how it goes. Many years ago there were three wise men. They had a long, hard journey. But when they arrived at their destination, they saw something overwhelming and indescribably wonderful—something that, once seen, changed them forever; something that, once seen, could not be unseen. They bowed down. And, when they traveled on, they followed a new way.

Gracious Lord, who made the star over the stable, who made the tree with the lights in it, and who made even our searching and wandering hearts, grant that in this season, and then in all the seasons of our lives, we might go and see and do likewise.

Amen.